Interviewers are asking my opinion of Internet Explorer 7. This, of course, is a softball. They tee it up anticipating a homerun account of how Firefox trounces IE.
But I’ve been answering truthfully: IE7 is a solid product. It vastly improves upon IE6 with useful features like anti-phishing that Firefox 2 will replicate.
I have nothing to gain from gratuitously denigrating IE. Firefox is and always has been about serving users, not crushing competition. It is scary to think what life would be like if I woke up each day thirsting for the fall of another company. If Microsoft hadn’t abandoned IE, there would have been no gap to fill—no user frustrations to tackle—and we probably would not have started Firefox.
But they did abandon it. For four years, and in the face of rampant pop-up ads, viruses and spyware, Microsoft left for dead a browser that hundreds of millions of people rely on. They’ve admitted it, and at the Webstock conference, Program Manager Tony Chor apologized for it. I’ve met Tony personally. I believe his apology.
Then I see the IE7 homepage proclaiming that “we heard you” and I just get furious, because I know that “you” isn’t really you, grandpa, Meredith, Jamie, Fletcher, Matt, Mike, Phil, it can’t be, because you complained for years and nobody heard you. It’s not you; it’s us. It’s Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Maxthon. Only the drip drip of leaky marketshare echoes in Redmond.
I know this is just the game, know that the IE marketing team wrote that sales pitch. The pitch I’m writing now isn’t to them but to the developers. You are working at a company that finds positive impact a mere side effect of competitive destruction.1 In thirty years, do you want to look back and think “I did that” or “I stopped that company from doing that”?
I urge you to find a company that truly listens to them, not us. It is much more rewarding.
1 Spare me the capitalist manifesto and Dodge v. Ford; a company can maximize shareholder value and still be socially responsible. When Microsoft abandoned IE, it abandoned 700 million people and set the Web back many years. Meanwhile, billions of dollars flowed to R&D projects that will never see daylight.
June 6th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Ugh. You called out the anti-phishing feature. I’ll write about it in a bit. I have issues w/ the implementations in both products.
Anyhow, “IE 7 is a solid product?” Those aren’t in the talking points. Heh.
June 7th, 2006 at 12:44 am
i love the rallying of the troops. perfect attitude about the intention of firefox for its users. also, great point on what to worry about when waking up. normally i am thinking special k with strawberries or oatmeal. trying to watch my weight lately:)
June 7th, 2006 at 12:50 am
If we’ve learnt one thing over the past month, it’s that online journalists don’t give a crap about how inaccurate or inane their stories are - as long as Digg or Slashdot links to them.
In that same respect, these people will seek to twist your words to add spin. “Firefox designer thinks IE7 is better”. And it doesn’t matter if they are correct or not. A ton of trolling will happen, lots of ad revenue will be made, and then when the truth is found out, it won’t be published. The stigma of the first article will have already been imprinted on the minds of thousands.
And this is the way tech journalism is heading, if not already there. If I have to hear a certain J.C.D spout some random tripe once more, I’m going to scream.
June 7th, 2006 at 1:00 am
Noah, you have a lovely figure; go with pancakes.
Kroc, good point, but no sense worrying about those who can’t be bothered with the truth. I didn’t say IE7 was a better product; I just said it’s a solid product, and I believe that. I wonder what would happen if everyone just said what they believed.
June 7th, 2006 at 2:09 am
You thought that IE7 is a solid product and you put forward your thought. Thats it. Why so much of hue and cry over the product?
One have to use it to believe it!!!!
June 7th, 2006 at 3:01 am
Solid product? Will it be properly CSS2 complient then?
June 7th, 2006 at 4:44 am
Glad you mentioned in the “us”, Maxthon! Or, MyIE2 before the name change. I was an avid user of it and could simply not bring myself to switch to Firefox. It was truly a lovely browser, and one feature I miss dearly is the ability to “force one window of Maxthon”. The tabs were sweet and it was really fast too, never ever a memory hog. But when you use a front end for IE, there’s only so long before you become a victim to some of it’s exploits.
Great read mate.
June 7th, 2006 at 6:29 am
I wish traditional news sites and tech news sites would have some guts and put a comment section on the bottom of articles like review sites do. I believe they fear correction right at the bottom of their articles. Its one thing for Slashdot to critique an article from its own site it something else completely for a news site to allow and promote direct criticism.
June 7th, 2006 at 7:44 am
> I wonder what would happen if everyone just said what
> they believed.
Excellent point! This thought has been playing in my mind for years. I’m glad there are others out there who value truth!
June 7th, 2006 at 8:29 am
They are only sorry that their scheme to force internet to their ways failed miserably. I think the neglect was part of strategy but it bit them in the ass.
June 7th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Solid? If by slower than IE6 and less customizable then any MS app then yea I guess its solid. IMHO the blatant lack of respect for user interface guidelines is enought to write this one off. But I digress.
Will the world benefit from a more standards compliant browser that possibly is more secure? Yup, let’s hope so. You calling it “solid” is a massive PR mistake. You should have thought before you printed that and you will regret ever posting it.
June 7th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
by saying IE7 is the worst thing that happened since the hollucost is just giving more PR and when he said it was a solid product he explained. He said it because he’s not trying to bite they’re heads off like some off you(ahem) he also said that by being competitive and not just trying to have a nice browser for users, firefox might regret certain actions and get a bad rep just like IE7 has already. if we were really wise and competitive at the same time we would let them commit suicide themselves with minimum expendeture on our energy, now that would be smart.
-yfit
June 7th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Xpuser: I generally try to involve my brain before writing or saying anything; believe it or not, it signed off on this one. When I’m old and gray, hopefully I won’t still be regretting the “massive PR mistake” of speaking my mind.
June 7th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
The post is a little more scornful and brooding than your usual. I do respect your patience with comments like Xpuser’s. I don’t have that.
Good rhetoric too — “Firefox is and always has been about serving users, not crushing competition.” Unlike Microsoft? Does FF not want to compete, just be loved? “[I don’t wake] up each day thirsting for the fall of another company.” Unlike Microsoft people, who do wake up this way, or just resume from hibernate?
Even if Microsoft had continued to work on IE with the same intensity after IE6, there would be huge gaps and user frustrations, by definition. Expectations rise. Lots of people were unhappy with IE4, 5, 5.5, and 6. No release is perfect, and software ages poorly. Lots of people are just prejudiced and don’t like Microsoft. I don’t know if you’d have started Firefox or not. The market for it would be quite different.
I agree that they abandoned active development of new IE. That — and painful silence — was the opportunity that Firefox needed. Microsoft did do some creative work in browsing like MSN Explorer (like it or not). They did provide security updates, fixed stability bugs, etc., but as Tony and others have said, that wasn’t enough.
The rest of the post kinda confuses me… are you saying that they didn’t FINALLY hear us via the choices we made in our browser? That they never can or will ever hear humans but only markets? That they should have said “we stopped ignoring you?” I’m really not sure.
The Maxthon thing is kinda weird to me… it’s like saying Firefox isn’t listening by not doing Flock’s features. Firefox enables developers to build Flock. IE enables developers to build Maxthon. I don’t think they care about IE share v IE wrapper share… do you guys care about FF usage v Flock usage? Never mind — you don’t care about usage. You just care about serving users. That’s why you’re not working on Firefox right now… never mind. Seriously — is it that you think they shouldn’t want developers to build on their platform?
Is it bad that there’s an IE marketing team trying to explain what they are doing? Is it any different from the Firefox or Google marketing teams and their sales pitches? I mean, I hear a lot of people telling the story of what IE hasn’t done for 5 years. I am kinda interested in what they have done now that they decided to rejoin the living.
I get that you feel strongly about what you wrote about at the end (and you’re smart, and write good software), so I want to understand it. I think your point is that while companies can be good, Microsoft is BAD. It’s bad not just because it’s destructive, but because it’s inefficient in its destructiveness (the footnote about the R&D that won’t ship). OK, that last bit wasn’t fair — but is the basic read (”Microsoft bad”) right?
I think the I did that v I stopped that company from doing that point is interesting — are you asserting that Softees sit around wanting to destroy and spoil? Whatever you state FF goals as, you can make the same statement about it: “We stopped Microsoft from (blank)!” Of course, (blank) will be something like “taking over the world,” so it’ll be a good thing.
The bit at the end about listening is kinda ironic, or at least vague. From http://www.gihyo.co.jp/magazine/SD/pacific/SD_0503.html:
Administer the project with an iron fist
Blake Ross says that Firefox development was organized “in a vastly different way” than other Mozilla projects. “Basically, we drew a line in the sand and said ‘Okay, we strongly value your input, but at the end of the day, these five people are going to make all the decisions about the product.’ In the old model, pretty much anyone with an idea and the technical know-how to implement it could proceed without obstacle. That led to software bloat and an absurdly complicated interface that even advanced users couldn’t understand. The best advice I can give to other open source teams-because I know this same problem plagues many other projects-is to use an iron fist and make decisions. There may be some backlash initially as your community reacts to the changes, but you’ll quickly develop a thick skin, and your product will be better because of it.”
I think that’s listening and hearing but ignoring with really good intent in your heart. I guess that makes you “better.”
June 7th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
In response to “Honest Inquiry” (#14):
> Does FF not want to compete, just be loved?
“Firefox” is not a person. It’s hundreds of thousands of people, so as usual, I’m speaking for myself. And I can tell you that I am not personally driven by competition, because I see no long-term satisfaction in “winning”. Nor is my personal motivation (in working on software) “to be loved”. It’s just what I said in the post: I’m motivated to serve users through easier technology.
> Unlike Microsoft people, who do wake up this way, or just
> resume from hibernate?
My post didn’t say Microsoft people wake up with vengeance in their eyes, so this is a non-sequitur. If anything, I suggested the opposite: that there are lots of great people at Microsoft motivated by all the right reasons, but they’re being hindered by a corporate culture that often isn’t.
> The rest of the post kinda confuses me… are you saying that
> they didn’t FINALLY hear us via the choices we made in our
> browser?
It shouldn’t have taken a massive hemorrhaging of users to restart development on what is arguably the most important software product of our time (by virtue of being the world’s most popular interface to the Internet). There was ample evidence that people were unhappy with Internet Explorer before Firefox appeared but that was not enough to get Microsoft’s attention. That’s irresponsible, and if I take off my Hat ‘o Idealism, that’s still terrible strategy because it paves the way for a newcomer. Indeed, it was only once an alternative appeared[1] and people began switching that Microsoft paid attention. What if no alternative appeared? This is moot in any case; development should never have stopped in the first place.
> That they should have said “we stopped ignoring you?”
No, I said in the post that I’m well aware this is just a marketing pitch and the message (from a marketing perspective) couldn’t have been phrased any other way. That’s why this post wasn’t addressed to marketers, but to developers.
> I think your point is that while companies can be good,
> Microsoft is BAD.
Your response tries to distill my post point-by-point into A or B. Nothing is ever that simple, or I would have just written “MICROSOFT IS BAD!!!” and moved on. I don’t even know what “good” and “bad” mean here, so I don’t know how to respond.
Your last point backfires because you misunderstand what I’m talking about. In that quote, I discuss the process by which Firefox developers received and dealt with input from community members. The purpose of that process was to balance the wishes of the Mozilla community, which was loudly and actively providing us with feedback, with the wishes of a much broader audience (the world), which would never talk to us through Bugzilla. In other words, I was explaining how we (tried to) put feedback from early adopters in its proper perspective so we could continue to design a product for the world at large. Since listening to the world is the crux of this post, I can only assume you misunderstood what you quoted.
—-
[1] This is not an attack on Opera; I think Opera users would agree that the browser was designed for and aimed at power users four years ago.
June 7th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Thanks for taking the time to answer. I really was trying to understand what you were saying (despite some of the snarky asides), and your comment helps me do that. Ex: you wrote “Firefox is and has been about X” and I took that at face value. “My work on Firefox is about X” makes a lot more sense to me.
I totally agree with you that it should not have taken what it seems to have taken to restart IE development. I think that stopping IE development was a mistake, capital-A Awful, irresponsible, inexcusable, etc. So, with that common ground… what’s their path to “forgiveness?”
I guessed with the “Microsoft Bad” statement, and I guessed wrong. I really do want to understand the point though. I tried the point by point breakdown because, well, that’s one way to debug. If you can restate the point explicitly I’d appreciate it because I do want to understand. I don’t want to guess wrong again.
I really meant the last point as a question not a point… I think you’re making a distinction about “the community” v “all users” or “all customers” that I don’t understand yet. (I believe it’s valid! I just don’t get it yet.) Again, I want to avoid bad guesses, so I’ll ask it as a question. Is the non-listening that FF did here OK because it was the elite geek community v your intuition of what was important for the rest of world, and (if so) that’s different from Microsoft’s not listening because they (whoever they may have been listening to) ignored The World at large?
June 7th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
> So, with that common ground… what’s their path to
> “forgiveness?”
Well, if they bury Firefox but continue IE development, that would be one way to demonstrate commitment. That’s sub-optimal ;)
In all seriousness, I don’t know; that’s for them to figure out, if they want to. It certainly won’t happen overnight.
> I think you’re making a distinction about “the community” v
> “all users” or “all customers” that I don’t understand yet.
“The community” was a few thousand people and “all users” were ~1 billion Internet users.
> Is the non-listening that FF did here OK because
The premise of the question is flawed… We did listen. The first half of the quote from me in question is “we strongly value your input” and it’s difficult to value input you aren’t listening to.
June 8th, 2006 at 12:22 am
I agree to “Honest Inquiry” on one point: Maxthon isn’t a competitor to IE. Neither is Safari, since MS dropped support for Mac OS and nobody would switch the OS just because of the browser (well, I would, if Gecko and Opera were absent).
June 8th, 2006 at 4:23 am
To Honest Inquiry:
> I think that stopping IE development was a mistake,
> capital-A Awful, irresponsible, inexcusable, etc.
> So, with that common ground… what’s their path to
> “forgiveness?”
…probably menaning, “how much do they have to pay to have everyone forget and move on?” :)
I’d let this one pass any day, but today I have some time to kill, so let’s consider a parable: I held you up on the street, I gave you a good shake, and took off with your wallet. I pretended I didn’t do anything like that, by now that you’ve offered solid arguments, I admit what I did, and the error of my ways.
So, “with that common ground,” what’s my path to forgiveness, as far as you’re concerned? Would it be sufficient that I simply said I was sorry? Or maybe I should pay back what I took away? Or shall I suffer more than that? :)
Back to MS, it would largely depend on the kind of damage they did, and the kind of profit they made.
The argument is simple: suppose they made the amount X (in the form of savings on development, or freeing capital to invest in more profitable venues, or whatever) out of selling their customers down the river. Suppose now, that they offer *GASP* the total amount Y as a tribute to those same customers (of course, it’s M$, they would never do that, but bear with me ;)
In the end, if Y - X comes out positive, they’ve made money out of it, and they can consider doing the same thing somewhere in the future — obviously, it’s a profitable business, a sound business-case, so to speak.
In the light of this argument, their “path to forgiveness” would be paying an adequate self-imposed fine to each of their customers so that the balance sheet would show that they didn’t make any profit out of this — or their excuse would not sound too plausibly otherwise.
Anyway, we’re living down here on Earth, and this is Microsoft, so I guess they’ll keep milking the crowd for all they can squeeze out, and be hated, as ever before.
To conclude my exposition, this is one of the most stupid questions I’ve ever heard. M$ make money. Forgiveness isn’t worth much on NYSE, so they don’t care about it.
June 8th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
I recommend to use Firefox, it is the surest browser.
I never had problems with Firefox on the other hand with IE I usually had
problems with Spyware and Dialers.
I the following link you can download the Firefox Browser, this version
included an orthographic corrector.
Download Firefox with
orthographic corrector ->
http://www.daniel.prado.name/download-firefox.asp
June 8th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
“You are working at a company that finds positive impact a mere side effect of competitive destruction.”
Interesting thesis. It makes a pretty bold implication about the intelligence and motivations of the thousands and thousands of folks who work here.
I work on IE7 every day to make a positive impact, and I know that in 50 years, I’m going to look back at our efforts here proudly.
No one disputes that Microsoft made a mistake after IE6 shipped. The world changed, assumptions were mistaken, and it took too long to react.
We’re back, we’re listening, and we’re already planning for IE8.
June 8th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
> It makes a pretty bold implication about the intelligence and
> motivations of the thousands and thousands of folks who work
> here.
No, it doesn’t. It makes a point about the way the company is ultimately managed and steered, which nobody has disputed yet. I try to write very carefully and would appreciate it if you could exercise similar care before accusing me of belittling “thousands and thousands of folks,” many of whom are my friends.
I know plenty of developers at Microsoft. They are good people motivated by good causes. I haven’t met you, but I’ve no doubt you’re one of them.
This post asked them to consider whether they might be working for a company that holds them back. You’ve already offered one example of that. After all, you say you work on IE7 to make a positive impact. But at Microsoft, you couldn’t work on IE in any significant fashion for years. I’m interested in your response to this.
I believe that you’re now listening to users again, but you personally are not in charge of IE’s fate. How do you know that if the competitive landscape changes over the next four years, Microsoft won’t pull the plug on IE again? That was the point of this post: that even though many Microsoft developers are surely guided by good intent, their ability to impact is ultimately tempered by a company which has a poor track record of listening to users.
June 8th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Blake, I must applaud you for your writting and calmness in answering to the comments. Last thing this very intelligent conversation needed was to turn into a flame war, you prevented this in an outstanding fashion. Unfortunatly, I wish ‘EricLaw’ would have done the same.
June 9th, 2006 at 9:07 am
> That was the point of this post: that even though many Microsoft
> developers are surely guided by good intent, their ability to
> impact is ultimately tempered by a company which has a poor track
> record of listening to users.
I think Blake makes an excellent point here, and just wanted to chime in in agreement. A lot of us (I, for one), often go around proclaiming that there is an inherit evilness to Microsoft. But there is no question that Microsoft is a company filled with many competent and often brilliant developers with good intents and ideologies on their software development. The fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, it’s Steve Ballmer and men like him who get the final say in what direction the company goes, and what priorities the company is going to take with its development. And, in my opinion, Steve Ballmer is probably the antichrist, or at least a close minion of the diablo, with no interest whatsoever in furthering anyone’s livelihood, only in swelling Microsoft coffers.
To be fair, Microsoft really is not an exception, and it’s really not anything new. Historically, monopolies have proven to be a very bad thing, and behave pretty much exactly as Microsoft has behaved during the peak of its reign (I dont know if I can say for certain if it was ever truly a monopoly, but I dont think anyone can deny that it was certainly at least a near-monopoly). There’s also a certain amount of accountability that gets removed in a corporate environment. You can take nearly any company, Intel, AMD, IBM, even Google itself as it grows larger, and I think you’ll see that a majority of their decisions are targetted on making more money for their company. That’s because there are executives all throughout the company, up-and-coming, and they want to do something to make a name for themselves, to get that promotion or raise. And how do they do that? They have to come up with some great idea that makes a lot of money for the company. They dont consider the rammifications of their actions or ideas, they’re mostly removed from the implementation altogether anyway. They throw out their ideas, get their praise, take their promotion, and often dont realize that in one fell swoop they may have just done something wrong like putting thousands of people from a competitor out of work. Or if they do consider it, they chalk it up to “Hey, this is a tough industry. They knew the risks they were taking.”
No doubt there are people in Microsoft thinking about what’s going to be best for the software industry in the long run, what’s going to create the brightest future. But those arent going to be the people coming up with the million-dollar money-making ideas, and thus arent going to be the people rising to the top.
The “evil” of Microsoft is just the evil of any company. And the larger and more powerful a company becomes, the more evil comes along with it. The reason Microsoft is such a huge target for flaming, the reason their “evil” seems so pronounced, is simply because they grew so large, and so powerful, and they became the industry leader, and we held them accountable. We expected them to rise up and say “Now that we are the leader, we’re going to make this a great industry! We want the future to be bright for us all!” But this isnt communism (and even if it was, communism never works as well in practice as it does in theory), this is capitalism, so Microsoft instead said “We’re going to charge as much for our products as we can, and you’ll buy them anyway!” No moral leader stood up to commandeer the company, because in a corporate setting that huge, that’s just impossible.
But, as a corollary of all of this, things like Firefox MUST happen. A competitor must rise up, must challenge the monopoly, and they MUST be brought down a peg. The only way to make Microsoft a better company is to make them a failure, or at least less of a success than they were previously. In the face of adversity, they will start to use their resources appropriately.
But regardless, Microsoft’s track-record cannot and will not be forgotten, and no one should believe that it’s going to be any different next round. If Microsoft becomes the monopoly they once were again, they’ll still just be a company, and chances are good they’ll do exactly what they did last round: stagnate and make money. I think when Blake points out the infuriating nature of “we heard you” (a sentiment I share with him), he makes a good point. Just because Microsoft is trying now, just because they’re finally doing what a company of their power should be, we’re not fooled by their assumed intentions. I think “Only the drip drip of leaky marketshare echoes in Redmond.” is as true of a statement as has ever been echoed, and it should be preserved in timelessness.
June 9th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
A competitor must rise up, must challenge the monopoly, and they MUST be brought down a peg. The only way to make Microsoft a better company is to make them a failure, or at least less of a success than they were previously.
This comment makes me think of IBM. They were one of the undisputed rulers of the industry — and well-known for throwing their weight around and relying on dubious marketing practices (the term FUD was coined to describe an IBM tactic, after all), until Microsoft and PC clones knocked them off their pedestal. One can certainly argue that IBM today is a more responsible company than they were at their peak.
Who knows — the same thing could happen to Microsoft.
June 9th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Kelson, I think this is exactly the reason that MS is introducing their “Live” stuff online. IBM’s knockdown came not because a direct competitor did better than them, but rather because someone shifted the entire industry to a place they could control. IBM was king of mainframes and large scale computing. When the industry shifted to PC’s IBM was out of place in the new market.
Microsoft is king of the PC world. Despite what various linux and Apple fanboys say, the PC world will most likely never be pulled out of microsoft’s hands. The vast majority of computer users in the world think “operating system” means “Windows” and I don’t really see that changing. But slowly but surely the world is finally shifting away from PC’s as we know them to being really just terminals to the internet. Granted, the online computing has a ways to go, but already most users could be served just fine with a kiosked browser. They can check email, write documents, create spreadsheets, and find out anything about anything with nothing but a browser. Which is why “Live” exists and why MS cares so much about their browser.
June 10th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
This article and the comment thread is one of the most interesting and thoughtful I have read in a long time. I congratulate Blake on a well written article and applaud his thoughful, reasonable responses to comments.
MS is not evil, simply monolithic and in error on its decision to stop development efforts on IE. It is the responsibility of all companies to balance the interests of shareholders, employees and customers. This is the nature of a company operaqing in a capitalist free market system. The error MS made was to pay too much attention to shareholder interest at the expense of customers AND employees. This ia a judgement error made by leaders in many organizations. Corrected, this decision will have little long term impact compared to the error in judgement of making the browser and the OS one.
I am an avid firefox fan because it dramatically improved the online experience for me. I will probably never go back to IE because browsing the internet with the operating system is inherently more risky and dangerous than browsing the internet with a piece of software which is seperate from the operating system. IMHO the MS decision to integrate the browser with the OS is on the same scale as the Apple decision to require fees from programmers developing software for its OS. If it stands, he long run this will result in IE being a product used by a vast minority (no pun intended). When Firefox gets big enough to attract to attract more attention from hackers and truly evil people it would not surprise me to see users migrate to the portable firefox model on their computers as standard operating procedure.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Blake, I was happy to see that you mentioned Maxthon in your post. You are right, the IE team didn’t hear “you”, rather the emergence of Firefox, Maxthon and Opera that made them (Microsoft) listen.
Unlike many people would like to think (especially journalist)we are not competitiors - we just want create better and improve softwares that are such a big part of people’s daily life.
June 23rd, 2006 at 11:44 pm
I admire your integrity … not 2 hours ago I was checking click-outs and noticed that a friend who’d come through was using M$IE; my line was “Get with the program, FireFox is the way to fly!”
But when it comes to being “furious” … aren’t you tilting at windmills here? Oh hey, hold on … when I first used Win95 (in an academic setting, using VB to write a VRML app) I pushed my associates hard to file a class action suit against M$ on grounds of psychological abuse. But you know, maybe they are listening, if only now? I think they FUD compulsively … and I believe they still use variants of astro-turfing … but I also think they’re listening.
At the risk of going way over the top: psychopaths are notable for their ability to refine their social behaviour, in contradistinction to sociopaths … they do not impose suffering for a cheap thrill; they impose suffering with impunity and indifference. *cough* 25c please
p.s. I still have your blog listed as “8 year old” … you don’t mind? ;-)
Congrats on 21.
June 27th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I have to say that I’ve enjoyed every thread of this most interesting tale. Maybe I’m a simple soul, certainly not a programmer or developer but just a mere user. However, as a user, there is one point that to me is probably the most pertinent. Firefox is free to all, Firefox don’t say that if you pay us a sum of money then we may let you upgrade to the latest version - then again..if you haven’t paid us enough money over the years…or we think you have been cheating on payment…we won’t let you have anything new. I still suspect (or possibly hope) that Microsoft will shoot themselves in the foot sometime - probably not in my lifetime though (I’m 9 btw).
I think it a bit sad that they (Microsoft) are more or less saying that their XP Home system is less than adequate and that they won’t be supporting it soon. Does that mean that they will be offering free upgrades to XP “Pro”?
Dell recommend XP Pro here in the UK - does that mean that buyers of the home version have been sold a pup?
Maybe there will be a new, reliable OS rise frome the ashes and we will all be happy with it and the way that its proprietors operate.
Anyway, I think that Firefox has been great and long may it reign
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:21 pm
I’m jumping in a bit late here; I made my way here from your recent Groklaw comment.
In #15, your first reply to “Honest Inquiry”, your footnote mentions that Opera was “designed for and aimed at power users four years ago.” Since I’ve only been using Opera for about a year and a half, I’m vaguely interested in your thoughts on the current state of Opera.
While I’m mostly indifferent to MSIE (aside from security concerns), I REALLY like Opera, and dislike - in general, nothing specific - the entire Mozilla family (including Netscape, which I HAD to use in the Navy ca. 97-98).